What Everyone Gets Wrong In The Debate Over Net Neutrality

...We shouldn’t waste so much breath on the idea of keeping the network completely neutral. It isn’t neutral now. What we should really be doing is looking for ways we can increase competition among ISPs—ways we can prevent the Comcasts and the AT&Ts from gaining so much power that they can completely control the market for internet bandwidth. Sure, we don’t want ISPs blocking certain types of traffic. And we don’t want them delivering their own stuff at 10 gigabits per second and everyone else’s stuff at 1 gigabit. But competition is also the best way to stop these types of extreme behavior.

Though the network will never be neutral, we can find ways of promoting a vibrant market for fast internet speeds that’s open to everyone. At the end of his rant, John Oliver actually comes pretty close to the real issue. Advocates, he says, “should not be talking about protecting net neutrality. They shouldn’t even use that phrase. They should call it preventing cable company f***ery, because that is what it is.”

The net neutrality debate is based on a mental model of the internet that hasn’t been accurate for more than a decade. We tend to think of the internet as a massive public network that everyone connects to in exactly the same way. We envision data traveling from Google and Yahoo and Uber and every other online company into a massive internet backbone, before moving to a vast array of ISPs that then shuttle it into our homes. That could be a neutral network, but it’s not today’s internet. It couldn’t be. Too much of the traffic is now coming from just a handful of companies...